Climate change is an immensely complex issue. While there is agreement among scientists that warming is occurring and human activity may be partly responsible, how much warming and how much of it is from anthropogenic causes is widely disputed.

For one thing, scientists are learning that global climate change is nothing new. The Earth has experienced global climate swings far more extreme than what we are experiencing now, long before man began releasing greenhouse gases-in fact, long before man existed.

As the Washington Post reports on an article in Geology, new research shows that 120 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, ocean surface temperatures varied as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research made the discovery studying ancient rocks from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Extreme temperature changes were previously known from data on rocks below the Atlantic Ocean, but this was the first study on the Pacific during the same period, showing the magnitude of climate change.

Commenting on the impact the new findings have on today's issue, lead researcher Simon Brassell says: "One of the key challenges for us is trying to predict climate change. If there are big inherent fluctuations in the system, as paleoclimate studies are showing, it could make determining Earth's climatic future even harder than it is. We're learning our climate, throughout time, has been a wild beast."

The study is just one example of the growing importance of paleoclimatology-the study of climate activity from ancient fossils-in understanding today's climate change. Key to the debate is whether naturally-created carbon dioxide played a dominant role in affecting climate change or whether natural variations like sea currents, cosmic rays, and sun activity contributed largely.

According to an article in the New York Times, "The discoveries [in paleoclimatology] have stirred a little-known dispute that, if resolved, could have major implications... One side foresees a looming crisis of planetary heating; the other, temperature increases that would be more nuisance than catastrophe."

But we don't hear much about it from global warming pundits because there's little consensus. The New York Times: "The Phanerozoic dispute, fought mainly in scholarly journals and scientific meetings, has occurred in isolation from the public debate on global warming. Al Gore in 'An Inconvenient Truth' makes no mention of it."

But then, shouldn't the New York Times be silenced-or even tried in a war crimes tribunal-for its "noise" on the global warming debate?